So you may have noticed that we started this season a little later in the week than our usual Tuesday – Friday schedule. This wasn’t planned, and I can say pretty confidently that I am totally at fault. The new credits sequence (which, interestingly enough, has been where most of my time has gone at the start of the last three seasons) turned out to need more work than I had anticipated, so I ended up spending most of Tuesday evening fiddling with it in Premiere. But, we also recorded four episodes, and I figured, “Hey, more Spoiler Warning is better, right?” So this episode ended up going up this morning rather than being pushed back to Monday.

Do note that this is not something we plan on sticking to – so next week we should be back to our normal schedule. But until then, feel free to enjoy this most-meta episode of Spoiler Warning.

It always struck me as really pointless even doing this loop. Benny is so obviously from Vegas, even if you don’t know much about the game, so if you can get past the various deadly creatures (using the stealth boy in the schoolhouse for example) then why even bother with the southern towns? What could you possibly gain other than proving your guy is amazingly thick and can’t tell the guy using gambling metaphors is probably from the gambling town.

I mean, at what point was your goal not completely obvious, bearing in mind the game is called Fallout: NEW VEGAS?

You start the game with a note (the Doc gives it to you) giving you the details of your package. Something like:
“Package 6/6, Platinum Chip
Enter Freeside and find the contact, retrieve the money. We are not responsible for any injury you may incur delivering the package”

Of course that doesn’t tell you WHY someone would want to kill you over it, but you do know the details of your own delivery.

And besides, while your character might not know this, you’ll need to raise a substantial amount of chips (or do a substantial number of favors for the King, uh-huh-huh) to get into Vegas proper. Sure, you could try to ambush him outside the city, but there are two major entrances and both are about equidistant from where Benny’d be coming from. Or maybe you could ambush him at the Strip’s entrance in Freeport, but Mr. House’s robots would probably back him up, seeing as he currently works for the guy.

And between Goodsprings and Vegas, there are the radscorpions, the Jackals, the deathclaws, and the terrible, terrible giant wasps.

Or you could up your science skill and mentally break the guard bot. Or up your speech and convince that one guy in Freeside(works on robots, in the Kings area. Mick and Jims is the store I think, maybe) to make you a pass.

Well, the pass is still 500 credits, even with the Speech check. I’ll grant you the Science thing, though isn’t it a fairly high DC? You’d have to spend some time leveling up to make it, which would mean either facing the aforementioned radscorpions, Jackals, deathclaws and giant wasps with nothing more than a Varmint rifle, a couple of shotguns, and a nearly-broken laser pistol, or…going to Primm!

Well you can get a cool floating robot to follow you around here.And a bit more to the south you can get a girl that will help you brew moonshine and have better effects from liquor.Both can be quite useful.

It really is kind of sad. While some of the quests in this game are genuinely interesting, so many of them are just lazy, lazy, lazy… I understand the desire to make the player explore the world, and fetch quests are one way of doing it, but “walk from point A to B” is not really my idea of “fun” when so much of the game already revolves around doing just that. That said, the quest design in New Vegas is still well beyond Fallout 3, but… honestly, even Dragon Age had better choice and consequence.

The ending montage has all the consequence I need. As for fetchquests, it often feels like they wanted to develop a location or a storyline, but couldn’t see it through because of time constraints and bad management, and padded out the content they already created with quick and dirty “bring A from B to C” type quests.

Like Bitter Springs: the area looks like it could have a dozen small, interesting tasks as well as it’s own storyline, but it just has a fetchquest and a setup for Boone’s personal quest.

Having grown up being privy to (and sometimes involved in) very frank conversations held by my mother, my sisters, and the majority of my female friends, hearing these kinds of things mentioned or discussed doesn’t feel weird or awkward at all.

Pap’s Mirror. They thought Mumbles was using her grandfather’s old mirror to look at herself, and they were surprised that she would be so vain. She just doesn’t seem the type to be obsessed with her image like that.

You sure? I thought I tested that myself but I may be wrong @[email protected] (Just seems odd he’d be healed so little by it if that’s the case as well). And yeah I think it’s only stimpacks in normal mode.

Im almost completely sure,because I know I was eating mostly just the same food type,and it always healed me fully.And Ive just checked the video again.He went from 20 to 230 hp by taking mostly items that give you 1-5 hp,except for sunset sarsparilla.Though he only needed four of those,and none of the other items he ate,so it is an overkill.

GfW means that the game can deal with gamepads, and corresponds to some basic criteria about running on Windows OS. A game without the GfW tag can tell your controller to go screw itself, and not run on Win7 64bit, for example.

Not that I think you are wrong, but I find it really distracting to watch controller- uhh- controlled play. It’s not even that I don’t like controllers, I use one for about half the games I play afterall. I just can’t help but notice how slow and unnaturally evenly it tracks across the screen, and in the worser implementations the enemy stickyness (where the reticule will move slower over enemies to make them bigger targets, and even move with them for a short distance). Again, this isn’t an anti-controller rant, I’m just wondering if this is just me. Certainly the complaint is more common against mouse controls!

I am not against the use of a mouse, but it is just the way he plays (and you are more likely to constantly look around with a mouse). A controller would slow him down to make it more watchable even though the gameplay would look less natural.

There is a reason why most films aren’t filmed by a twelve year old, you need to be able to see what is going on. This is like watching the Cloverfield of gaming.

What I do now is I just listen to it and minimize the window, but I would prefer watching it to see what I missed in my playthrough.

Yes, but New Vegas has no Games for Windows to be found. Probably why the PC DLC ended up being delayed.

And no, I totally agree, I have a major problem with watching first-person games controlled by analogue sticks… they strike me as just slow and clumsy, even for players who are supposedly “good” with them. I can barely walk a straight line in a console shooter, and seeing even the best players seemingly struggle and bump into walls every minute is just kind of sad. Someone needs to make mouse and keyboard controls standard for consoles next generation. Nintendo could do it and we’d call it innovative!

I hate keyboards for gaming. I can see the benefit of a mouse, but I always end up hitting the wrong keys at crucial moments. Not to mention moving without the ability to adjust your speed or alter direction outside of the cardinal directions is just silly.

Remapping is usually the thing I do first with any game(along with tweaking other options).Its far easier for me to spend 5-10 minutes fiddling with options that to have to learn everything anew with every game.

I have an easier request: Don’t jump every two seconds. Seriously. Just try to walk in a boring straight line if there is nothing going on. Every game should have a stamina bar just so Josh cannot bunny-hop for three episodes straight.

Ah yes, I have fond memories of getting my first crippled leg from those mines in hardcore mode. Nothing quite like fighting through an entire hotel and rollercoaster on one leg while you desperately search for a doctor’s bag (I had already forgotten doc Mitchel existed and could help out).

Me too! I remember seeing the huge rusted cowboys, hobbling up to them with next to no health and three broken body parts, thinking “Oh thank god I’m saved” when I saw the NCR outpost. I also remember hobbling away the next morning, after discovering that there aren’t any doctors there.

I didn’t get the game until a month after release (before the comprehensive patch though), so maybe that’s why, but honestly I NEVER found all that many bugs. And none of them were all that serious (a few NPCs walking into picnic tables and an undead prospector).

Honestly, I found WAAAAAY more bugs in 3 (which I played a year or two after release) than I ever did did in New Vegas.

Well I never ran into anything gamebreaking really (with the exception of Vault 22 in New Vegas, but that wasn’t the game’s fault, it was mine for accidentally fast traveling out of a locked-down fault without thinking), it was just hilarious physics stuff mostly, aside of one time in 3 when a Deathclaw spawned in Paradise Falls and started murdering the hell out of EVERYTHING.

And why did you pick the wild wasteland perk and then not comment when it kicks in,or even look for the other places of interest?

But you get ed-e in this town.Thats useful.

As for cannibalism,its not really that useful.I ran into a farm and stocked on so much corn there that I had to sell half my food,and still had more than enough to last a looong time.I even had plethora of doctors bags on the ready for when I finally got the nerve to assault deathclaws.

Oh,and one thing you forgot to say:Folks from bethesda said that theyll be doing the bug testing for the game.When I heard that,I laughed out loud,for real.Still,turned out to be quite more stable than Id expected it to be.A crash every 4 hours is annoying,but I expected way worse.At least none of my saves got corrupted.

Cannibalism really is useless. It heals next to nothing at later levels. It’s honestly faster to fast travel away, buy some stimpaks, and travel back. Waste of a perk, but at least there are actually good ones to take in New Vegas, unlike Fallout 3 where half of them were just bullshit like “oh you get more points in Small Guns.”

Oh, and don’t be surprised at the lack of buginess. After three games on this engine, you’d have to expect Bethesda to iron out most of the kinks. It’s less a testament to their ability as developers as it is just a reminder that they had three tries before they did a decent job. Multi-GAME OF THE YEAR developer Bethesda in the house, mofos.

The one use I could wrangle out of it is farming bad karma, since getting “Absolute Monster” status is so damn hard (even if you nuke megaton, the karma gets back to saint after a level or two). Of course, in New Vegas Karma doesn’t matter one bit, which makes one wonder why they even kept the stupid system, as it was practically replaced by reputation.

You can’t really have negative karma in New Vegas…I am currently doing a kill-everything-that-moves run and I have Very Good Karma. The reason for this is that killing Ferals or Raiders gives you positive Karma…the former is understandable, since you end a tormented existence, but the latter is completely ridiculous…killing a human being in cold blood can never get you good karma, no matter the circumstances…

I dislike the former. So let me get this straight: you are good because you are killing the monsters attacking you in self defense… as opposed to being evil and selfish by letting them tear your face off?

Except for the occasional CTD (I think I had like 3 during the whole game) most of the bugs I experienced weren’t so much engine related as scripting related. Quest triggers that never registered, NPCs that never or double spawned, dialogues that didn’t change despite the town/quest/NPC status changing (so again: trigger not registered or variable not changed), things like that.

They are actually more useful than guns.Someone commented in one of the last episodes how the van graffs were a hard fight,and others said how they needed to mine the place in order to win.I went there with a super sledge,and I killed everyone in less than a minute.Seriously,everything falls like flies when you get in their face.The only enemy I avoid meleeing are the deathclaws and cazadors.

My only regret is that I picked melee instead of unarmed because ballistic fists are such a great concept.Not as powerful as the thermic lance,but it is a glove with a freaking shotgun!Though I gave that to veronica.

Therein lies the issue though: you can’t really melee certain enemies because they’ll fucking DESTROY YOU. I’ve never met a Cazador or Deathclaw that doesn’t explode when I shot it with my Anti-Material Rifle.

Well you can melee cazadors,but its annoying how you have to deal with poison for a looong time afterwards.Its more of an inconvenience than a threat.Though if you lure them to come one by one,they will never touch you.

And you can melee deathclaws 1 on 1.But they are usually in packs,and having to fight 4+ of those super fast beasties is a threat.Though with high constitution and power armor,even this becomes a breeze.So if you have drugs to spare,you dont need guns for this either.

Plus,with melee weapons you dont have to worry about ammo,so shopping becomes much smoother.One big problem with guns is the inventory management.Which is why I prefer energy weapons,as it is much easier to convert all the power cells into one type.

Though I admit,sniping is fun,and I usually do play a sniper in such games,new vegas has showed me the power of the brawler side.And in this case,the game for me is very close to fallout 1 which made me appreciate cyberpunk,which I wasnt a fan of before.

There was a melee perk that gave +20% damage against deathclaws, can’t remember the name, that one really made fighting them a lot more manageable. I fought the alpha Deathclaw with the unique super sledge and he went down in two hits thanks to that perk.

Purifier. It actually adds 50% to all unarmed and melee attacks against mutants, abominations (Deathclaws) and ghouls. Also, the third rank of the challenge perk Abominable gives an additional 10% damage against all abominations.

But then you’re just replacing ammo management with drug management. As a sniper, I never have to worry about addictions or anything, I just sit on a ridge and pick them off. Advantages/disadvantages.

Having said that though, I abuse the hell out of mods and often rarely bother fighting by myself, preferring to abuse Unlimited Companions and Build Your Own Bots to the point where I would eschew armor in favor of suits to better play the role of House’s Middle Management, with my party members and security bots as the muscle (though I did have to help out in Quarry Junction, the Dam, the Deatchclaw Promontory, and a couple other places).

“But then you're just replacing ammo management with drug management.”

Not really.I mostly use drugs for carrying capacity and for speech checks.Rarely do I use them for combat,and its only when I engage something much over my level that I use drugs for combat.So basically,Im constantly addicted to alcohol,and rarely to anything else.

On my first playthrough, I was trying to play a sniper. The first time I tried to fight a (single) deathclaw, I emptied my sniper rifle clip on it and got just a pinch of its health down. In desperation, since it was on top of my by then, I switched to my melee weapon, the ballistic fist.

After that, no more deathclaws where seen in the vecinity.
That`s also how I killed the final boss.

Yeah, on my hardcore playthrough I was playing low endurance melee only, and once I got the fire axe I was nigh unstoppable from then on. At higher levels I could run into a bunch of deathclaws and be the only thing with legs to stand on by the end of it (at this point I had the unique super sledge, I forget it’s name). Even Cazadors became a matter of timing, though I still kept an antivenom or two on me.

Melee, unarmed, or Guns. Doesn’t matter in the end. It depends on your character build and perks. A Guns character with the right set of perks is just as effective as a melee or unarmed character with their perks. Deathclaws, as an example, can either be downed either by pummeled toe to toe or they can be shot from a distance. Either way they are taken care of just the same in both instances. It’s all preference and has nothing to do with usefulness.

that and the fact that in new Vegas once you own it you have a finite amount of ammo in which to use as well as the fact that its only available if you choose a certain perk. overall though yes the alien blaster is one of the better energy weapons in the game.

After the patch they are not bad…especially for high crtit characters, since they have a higher bonus compared to other weapons…also they use less different ammo which makes them especially useful in hardcore…you don’t have to carry around a multitude of different bullets and still be versatile…

unfortunately for my self i think the console only got one patch,(Im unsure as to if that patch fixed that particular issue with the critical damage). but overall i still find energy weapons a worthwhile skill to invest in definitely.

Thats only if you count just the damage output.It comes down to whether you prefer range or simplicity of the inventory.And energy weapons arent that useless,especially because they give you both more simplicity than guns,and more range than melee.Plus,after patching,they became as deadly as guns,and deadlier if you have a build focused on criticals.

Yeah, as you said one of the draws is quite simply RANGE. Sitting half a world away pulling triggers beats in-you-facitude for me any day. Also with ranged you can confuse the enemy on terrain. I killed the deathclaw mother by finding a nice spot where she and her babies could path to, then standing and pelting them with (insults) most of my microfusion cells. This was level ~13 I believe, so it ended up using a lot of cells, and I was eventually just flinging all the dynamite I’d looted from the powder gangers and hoping for the best. But I made it after 200~ cells and 20~ sticks of dynamite.

Melee weapons are extremely good later on, when you can get Super Sledges and stuff. I made a melee character in New Vegas (after watching Josh kick ass in the Fallout 3 Spoiler Warning, *ahemcough*), and it was really damn effective. You never have to worry about ammo, only about repairing them once in a while.

Higher tier melee and unarmed weapons can kill deathclaws easily,thats not the problem.The problem is that they are way faster than you,and they are in packs,so by the time you kill 2 of them,the others will gang up on you and destroy you.Of course,if you pick them one by one,youll have no problem.

does anybody know the meaning behind the red balls and playing cards on top of the ridge? i know its there because of the wild wasteland trait but i never quite understood if it was random or a reference for something else.

It’s a reference to a certain thread on the somethingawful forum where a guy once described his game-idea (the Zybourne Clock I believe it was called) in a rather silly way and got laughed at by the many forumites. The lead designer of New Vegas is a member of those forums (and posted pretty frequently in the New Vegas thread as well).

Actually, if you talk to “Mayor” Cobb, he’ll tell you that even though his guys in Goodsprings (although I made no effort to help and he was the only Powder Ganger left after the raid) are gonna cut back on the killing, those guys around Primm are jerks and will still shoot at anybody.

One of the big inaccuracies for me is actually the sky. It kind of bugs me to see all those little clouds painted all over the sky; in a desert, it’s almost unheard of to have a cloud-painted sky. The sky is either completely clear, or completely overcast. There’s not really much in-between.

I actually had to go check my list of mods, because I installed the NV version of Fellout as soon as I possibly could, and had all but forgotten that the game looks different. It’s only now that I realise why the Spoiler Warning sky looks so much washed out than I remember from playing the game.

On the other hand, if the skybox was just blue it might look like they just threw on a flat colour and called it a day. Non-Nevadans would be all “where are the clouds anyway? Man, Obsidian is so lazy”

While I’m sure there are inaccuracies in the game (a lot of down to scale probably), it seems a fair amount of research went into the overall gameworld. I remember the lead designer going on motorcycle trips around the Mojave area and taking pictures for reference, getting the plant-life correct and so forth.

Following point one, Goodspring`s elevation is more evident if you follow the north (cazador infested) road. The height changes there are less smooth than the path the game expects you to take at the beggining.

24 miles, says Google. I think you could see cityglow at night (especially if overcast, though apparently you don’t get overcast much!), but I wouldn’t expect the clear silhouette of a building, probably?

Ah, how I miss being able to read half a comment as I watch, get totally distracted, and have to go back to figure out what someone is talking about. Or pause halfway through someone’s sentence to read something someone said or post my own comment and spend like ten minutes trying to find it buried in all the other comments.

I hope someday we see an episode that shows clips of this episode’s beginning and then it does something crazy like cuts to a clip of Ruts playing Hitman or something and the conversation continuing on as if that was also a season of Spoiler Warning. (Btw for those who haven’t seen it I highly suggest you watch the latest Ruts hitman video. This goes double for Josh, Mumbles, and Shamus. )

And to end this comment on an inexplicable low note: Pabst smear. Just think about it.

So four episodes in and I already have two quotes from Josh that I love:

“It’s like if the builders of the Hindenburg had to build a airship but used the design of the Titanic.” and “Sooner or later you are going to be down and out in the middle of a room with a million dudes outside and you will be giving long meanful looks at people you’ve already murdered.”

Lol, I just read Shamus’ tweet about the hopping. I could tell Josh was at least trying to remember occasionally not to bounce everywhere, so I’m happy. Probably he’ll revert to the full on deranged bunny within 2 more episodes, but I’ll be used to it by then.